boss, Murray Hillsinger, a toadlike man, had already positioned his large bottom smack in the middle of a coveted corner banquette, twisting his jowls left and right to survey the scene from his primo lily pad. He was very proud to have his square corner banquette (even though it wasn’t as prestigious as the center round tables—those went to higher rollers with huger titles, companies, and net worths). I took a deep breath and walked over, smoothing my hair as I did so, trying to exude professional acumen, the only attribute I could for sure hold on to.
“Allie, come here. Glad you came before my lunch partner shows up.” He patted the leather next to him. “You’re going to do fine, kid.”
Like so many guys named Murray, it seems, he grew up poor on the backstreets—in this case, Long Island City, Queens. His nose was crooked from one too many fistfights, and his large forehead was now crowned with an unfortunate shoe-polish comb-over. The expensive loafers he sported were not designed for feet that caused the leather to crack in a fault line next to his big fat pinkie toe.
I moved my way around the seat on Murray’s right. “Relax. It’s going to go fine,” he told me as he chomped on a large cauliflower cluster drenched in green dip and roughed up the back of my hair like I was his kid sister. I was a kid when I started this job a decade ago in my early twenties, and neither he, nor I, to my dismay, ever got past that initial dynamic.
Georges—the famous-in-his-own-right maître d’ of the Tudor Room—rushed to the table, an invisible cloud of his cologne preceding him. Georges ladled more dip into the ramekin dish as he asked, “Would you rather I pour the sauce on your tie directly, or should I allow you to stain it yourself?”
The very French Georges knew that the powerful always favor those employees willing to show jocular insubordination. I watched as he moved off into the room, slipping from table to table making clever, and often hilarious, asides to the assembled men and women who pretty much ran every major hedge fund, real estate empire, and media conglomerate in Manhattan.
Murray sat at the helm of the biggest public relations firm in New York, Hillsinger Consulting, hell-bent on saving the reputations of most of the people in this very room, many of them guilty as charged for causing the recurring economic downturns that trickled down and crippled the rest of us. The Tudor Room was a new hotspot for these powerful warriors who dined in packs, many having migrated from the more clubby Four Seasons Grill Room. The new place was part lunch spot and part womblike secret society where they all felt cozy in their amniotic bubble—this protective coating thickening ever since they had been targeted by America for causing the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression.
“Order something, Allie!” Murray barked, always solicitous in his own special way.
“Thanks, no food, my meeting is soon,” I said. “Besides, I’m too on edge.”
“About what? You’re tough. That’s why you got the big job,” Murray said, trying to prop me up for my meeting in fifteen minutes at the Tudor Room bar to placate the unreasonable newswoman Delsie Arceneaux. If I didn’t always have the keen sense that Murray believed in me, and if I hadn’t always witnessed him doing the mensch-y thing, like promoting all the smartest women in the office, I would have quit doing crazy things for him long ago.
Sitting at the bar, Delsie Arceneaux glanced over and winked at Murray through her signature large tortoiseshell glasses as she barked into her phone before our meeting started. She was the impetuous, African American news anchor of the “all Delsie all the time” cable news network, most famous for draping her fortysomething, voluptuous body over an army tank while she interviewed the commander of the U.S. forces in Kabul. The perennial glasses had been Murray’s idea to disguise her beauty queen looks and highlight her legitimate cerebral side.
“No,” I replied. “You got the big job. I service your requests and put your crazy notions on paper.” Today’s particular request was to placate a news anchor, known for alienating her staff by overriding their every decision and action. “Does she even know we are also representing the people who are asking her to speak …”
“Order some broth, Allie.” Conflict of interest was a concept that Murray Hillsinger found utterly tiresome. “Calm the fuck down. Nothing wrong with us booking our own clients for our other clients and taking a little cut on both sides.” He pushed the tan parchment paper menu too close to my face and pointed at the appetizers.
Georges came over to hover and pour two thousand more calories of dill cream into the dip ramekin.
“I don’t want any soup, Murray.”
“Give her the soup, Georges. She works too damn hard and deserves a little pleasure once in a while. You know the good one I mean. The light one, the brothy one. With those duck balls.”
“Foie gras wontons, sir.” Georges wrote the request down with his dainty fingers wrapped around the tip of a miniature gold pen.
“Really, Murray?” I pleaded. “Thirty-eight dollars for consommé I don’t even want?”
“She’ll have the consommé.” Murray looked at the maître d’ and then back at me. “You got some time before your meeting. It’ll settle you down. Gimme the lobster salad before my guest arrives as a little preappetizer. Double order.” Georges nodded and left the table.
“Why are the most famous people also the most neurotic about public speaking gigs? She looks into a camera and speaks to four million viewers and she can’t give a speech to two hundred people?”
He patted my hand. “All the news anchors do this. The camera is her guardian and her barrier. Without it, the live audience terrifies her. Just go handle her nerves for me. And have some soup.”
Next to me, a glamorous newspaper publisher in a sunny yellow Oscar de la Renta spring dress and matching bolero sweater raised her index finger in the air at Georges and mouthed Charge it to my account as she sashayed toward the door.
I leaned toward Murray, whispering, “I don’t need the soup because I don’t like to throw money away like all your friends in here.”
“It’s not about the money in this room. It’s about what you’ve accomplished.” He stole my nose with his finger like I was five years old. “M-E-R-I-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y, kid. ’Tis the beauty of this room. Money gives you power in here, but only if it’s ‘fuck you’ money you earned. There’s no one with Daddy’s inherited cash in here. Self-made or get the hell out.” Murray’s voice was thick, more truck driver yelling at someone to get out of the way than genius spinmeister. As Murray turned his head to wave with feigned friendliness to a rival, two little curls of hair behind his ears bounced out from the hair gel meant to smooth them down, making the flat part of his comb-over seem that much more incongruous.
I looked at my watch. Five more minutes before my meeting. Across the room, I saw Delsie throw the long end of her spring, lime-green cashmere scarf around her neck and behind her shoulder. “What about Delsie with her four-point-five-million-dollar annual salary you worked so hard to leak?” I asked. “It’s not about the money in here?”
“That broad’s got raw star power and black and white viewer appeal no one can touch. Delsie took over that cable network and got the ratings they’d coveted for years. No one can say she didn’t do that on her own.”
“On her own? Really? You believe everything you peddle, Murray? Delsie secretly pays us to doctor her appearances and often her scripts. Did you forget you have me fixing her lame copy at all hours?”
He
